B302 Coursework case study question 2 summary

Academic year 2011/12

Marks are provisional and subject to plagiarism detection using Turnitin and approval at the Unit Assessment Board. The coursework (marks from question 1 and 2 combined) contributed 40% to the B302 unit mark. Students may view their individual coursework marks by using these steps:

Login to Mosaic.

View their individual coursework page. The coursework mark will be displayed at the top left corner of the page.

The coursework assignment and the coursework submissions are available online. There were 117 coursework submissions from 118 registered students.

Many of the quantitative errors were related to one of these areas:

Incorrect usage of NPV in place of expected value.

Incorrectly reducing the number of alternatives to only two choices: buy or not.

Incorrect setup of the decision tree.

Costs of printers were incorrectly discounted. As the purchase would have happened at the start of the period of analysis, the cost did not require discounting.

Incorrect unit of time for discounting calculations. Using units of time smaller than one year increased the number of calculations and led to a higher probability of errors.

Similar to the first coursework question, it was surprising that only several students took the time to research the actual warranty for the printer in the question. The Xerox website confirms that the warranty for a new printer is 3 years or the period of financing, whichever duration is longer.

Coursework with marks of 4 indicate significant errors or misunderstanding of decision trees, present values and expected values. Marks of 5 and 6 contained mostly correct quantitative analysis, but, with noticeable errors. The main difference between 5 and 6 is that coursework with marks of 6 attempted more personal reflection and/or consideration of qualitative factors. Coursework with marks of 7 had strong quantitative content, but, still contained errors.

When compared to coursework question 1, there were 2 more students who participated in the peer review and 26 more students who received 6 extra marks for correctly identifying one of the responses with marks of 7 or higher.